Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

EVENTS

Trump Wigs Out on Twitter

On election night, Donald Trump completely wigged out (see what I did there?) on Twitter once it became clear Obama was going to be reelected. He unleashed a series of tweets, each one more strident than the last, expressing his outrage. Here they are, in order:

He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!

No, Donald. He didn’t lose the popular vote. This is the guy who actually thought about running for president and it never occurred to him that there were millions more votes to be counted on the west coast, the majority of which would be for Obama.

The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one!

We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!

Lets fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us.

More votes equals a loss…revolution!

This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!

Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble…like never before.

Comments

For some reason I don’t remember The Donald (or any of those who agree with him) getting upset over the previous elections where the electoral vote and popular vote went opposite directions. 2000, for instance.

He’s probably standing a room filled with mirrors and can see millions of reflections of himself. And since he knows that he and all his reflections have voted for Romney, he can understand why Romney lost.

Please go away and educate yourself. A republic is a form of democracy.

dictionary.comdemcracy
1. government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
2. a state having such a form of government: The United States and Canada are democracies.
…

@Reginald Selkirk #14 – The distinction between a democracy and a republic is important. In a democracy, the mob governs. In a republic, the power of the mob is strictly limited by constitutions, laws and judicial interpretation.

More to the point, the popular vote is entirely irrelevant. The people do not elect the President, they elect a slate of electors who represent the will of the state when they vote for the President. America is, after all, a republic and not a democracy.

Michael Steele, former head of the party that claims to Revere Our History claimed on Fox last night that a loss in the popular vote but a win in the Electoral College was “unprecedented.” And they say irony is dead.

Best comment about The Donald that I’ve seen so far was from@TeaPartyCat

Donald Trump is calling for revolution. Revolution. Can someone remind him what happens to rich loudmouths in a revolution?

“We are not a democracy. We are a republic. Oligarchic, plutocratic, but a republic”

“Republics can be undemocratic, they just can’t have hereditary monarchs.”

To be totally fair, our form of government is actually a democratic republic. This is what was intended by the Constitution, and it is the official form of our government, even if a bit tarnished in practice.

He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!

Trump can sit in his swivel chain and revolve until he pukes, for all I care.

My main regret about the election is that term limits mean we may never know how many consecutive popular vote majorities it takes for conservatives to accept the legitimacy of a black Democratic president.

Republic is a form of state; democracy is a form of government. Please try to keep them distinct. You can have democratic republics (USA), undemocratic republics (North Korea, China), democratic non-republics (UK – democratic monarchy, we do it deliberately to confuse you) and non-democratic non-republics (L’etat c’est moi).

So please stop saying that the USA is a republic not a democracy. The wrongness grates.

@Gregory in Seatle #19: Sorry, that’s just plain wrong. You’re arguing against the dictionary on democracy as Reginald Selkirk pointed out; your definition of a republic is just as wrong. In fact I’ve only encountered that “definition” as a right-wing talking point used to discredit the Democratic Party. America is both a republic and a democracy; Canada, under the Queen, is a democracy, but not a republic. If you want examples of undemocratic republics you might have to look at something like the historical Republic of Venice.

This (Trump, not the nit-picking over republic vs democracy) is what happens when someone starts from the premise that they and their side are unfailingly right. That assumption comes from listening to god (fundies) or their own massive egos (Trump.) When something contradicts the “We’re always right” premise, they lose their shit.

Is it just me or doesn’t your electoral college actually have a purpose?

I mean moving towards a completely popular vote would be all nice and dandy for democracy (and we instated that here in CZ), but isn’t the whole point of representative democracy that the elected officials are vetted by internal party processes (that everyone can of course take part in) and aren’t majority-vote systems are designed to favour either-or elections?

The idea is to prevent unknown outliers from getting elected.

And as far as I can see, another reason for the EC to do with your federal system? If electoral votes are divided by population, that removes undue influence of states with higher voter turnouts (so as not to give an advantage/disadvantage to states with disproportionate demographics different number of old people, poor people, minorities, children).

I’d say splitting the electoral college votes in each state would be enough to satisfy the requirements of democracy while protecting state interests.

Maybe that’s just me – I’d do away with it in a moment, but its not as if it was a completely meaningless voting system.

@31 — you’re on the right track. The electoral college was instituted in part because the original colonies were still adjusting to the idea of being one country. Even into the 1860’s, loyalty to one’s state was more important to many people than loyalty to the country. (Robert E. Lee was actually offered command of the Union armies, if I remember right, but didn’t feel he could turn on the state of Virginia.)

It was also set up the way it is in order to dilute the power of bigger states, in order to get the smaller ones to agree to the whole thing. Personally, I agree that splitting the electoral votes by congressional district, with the two at-large votes going to the state winner, makes sense. Which probably explains why it’s not going to happen.

Is it just me or doesn’t your electoral college actually have a purpose?

The founders somewhat distrusted direct election because they thought people would pick their local candidate over someone distant, rather than choosing based on policy. They were right; most candidates win their home states handily, probably due to this exact bias. This is a relatively minor issue now, but with only 13 states, it would’ve been a much bigger concern for them. We don’t need a fix for this problem now, but at that time, its resonable to think that they did.

They also didn’t like the idea of the House, Senate, or state Governors electing the President. So the electoral college system was picked as a sort of ‘better than the rest’ system. The idea was that each state would pick a bunch of smart, mature, honest people who represented that states’ people to sit in it, and they would make a representative choice. Although the system is not foolproof against corrumption or manipulation, since the electors weren’t themselves in any sort of office, the chance of horsetrading or corruption would at least be less than if you have Reps, Senators, or Governors doing the same thing.

Part of the reason I support the electoral process is that in many ways, the US is a confederacy of 50 small nations.

The federal government should be governing the states, while the states get to govern the people. The federal prevents the states from violating the civil rights of the citizens and regulates trade between the states, as well as stepping in when there are jurisdiction issues with crimes occurring across state borders. And of course, the federal controls the military due to it being made up of citizens from the different states.

So the electoral system exists to ensure that the welfare of each state is represented, while the state ensures the welfare of it’s citizens are represented.

At least that’s a simplified explanation for how it’s supposed to work. In reality, like all things involving humans, it’s more complicated, and probably a lot more stupid and irrational.

#36 “Part of the reason I support the electoral process is that in many ways, the US is a confederacy of 50 small nations.”

I agree this is how things were before nationalism came about and to an extent it’s how things are now. However if we’re going to become a great country in the future, that attitude has to change. We can’t keep running around herding cats. We have to be on nation, indivisible. Not 50 mini-nations that call themselves a country. Times have changed. Globalization is here. A person can live in one state and work in another state, or even another country. Now while states make it easier to bring social progress, it can also work in reverse so I don’t have a perfect solution. Except to say that we can’t go back to thinking ourselves as Virginians or Texites, we have to think of ourself as USAns.

This hasn’t been true since at least the early 20th century, probably not since the US Civil War.

In fact, if you look at the history of the admission of the states, the US hasn’t operated like a confederacy since the original 13 states ratified the present Constitution; with the exception of the admission of Texas (and maybe California or Hawaii), new states were not small nations joining the confederation; rather the process (and mindset of the citizens in the territories) were much more like unincorporated counties finally getting their right to self-governance that were due to them as fellow citizens of the nation.

Maybe you meant that you would prefer the US be more like a confederation of small nations; I pretty much think that is very impractical given the realities of the 21st century.

=8)-DX, #31:Is it just me or doesn’t your electoral college actually have a purpose?

You have to remember that back in 1789, there weren’t all that many examples of constituional democratic republics based on the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment; the founders of the US were pretty much winging it. I give them credit for making a good faith effort, but in my opinion they some blunders; I think the electoral college was one of them.

One of the things they were afraid of was the anarchy of mob rule inherent in what they thought of as too much democracy.

It is also true that at the time, the US was 13 almost sovereign nations coming together, and the states wanted to preserve their independence and autonomy, hence the state legislatures choosing the electors.

Another thing to remember about the Electoral College is that is was set up before easy, fast long distance travel. It was assumed that relatively few people would be familiar with the people likely to be good candidates for President. (Bear in mind that as originally set up, they guy who came in second in the Electoral College became Vice-President….so *all* candidates were–potentially–running for President.)

What I would like to see, as a first step, would be to eliminate the electors in favor of simply assigning the EC “votes” automatically based on how the popular vote goes in each state, which is the current underlying assumption anyway. States would still have the option of doing winner-take-all or alloting electoral votes by Congressional district (there are, what?, one or two states that do it that way?). At the very least, this would eliminate the possibility of “rogue electors”, especially in a very closely divided Electoral College.

(NB. So far as I know, it is *still* possible to get a President from one party and a Vice-President from the other. I will leave as an exercise to the reader to look up how this could happen…unlikely as it is.)

DaveL“My main regret about the election is that term limits mean we may never know how many consecutive popular vote majorities it takes for conservatives to accept the legitimacy of a black Democratic president.”
Well, it took Obama becoming president for them to pretend to look fondly at Clinton so, mathematically, it will take the first Venusian president…

Wes“Looks like he deleted all the comments about Obama losing the popular vote once he realized it was wrong. No surprise there.”Wil Wheaton saved them. Because that happens, apparently.

montanto“To be honest a lot of what he was saying last night was so monumentally stupid I began to wonder if he was just trolling.”
Or as Trump calls it, “being awake”.

You know, I used to loathe Donald Trump for all the usual reasons. Then as he began to whore his name and image on TV show after TV show I felt contempt for him. But now… I just feel pity. He’s a sad, empty little man and he’s more than a little off balance. But because his money keeps him surrounded by enablers and yes-men he’s not going to get the help he needs. And that’s just sad, no matter how repugnant the person.

“Tears of blood” is an oblique reference to an endangered lizard native to central Arizona which has a defensive mechanism of squirting blood from near its eyes. Put another way, Nugent is a small, helpless, and frightened Lizard Person.

I don’t pity Trump or Nugent, or any of the other ridiculously self-deluded and/or pragmatic people who saw Mitt Romney as either the answer to the multifarious problems America faces in the 21st century (deluded) or the candidate who was most likely to use his power to increase their wealth (pragmatic). Democracy depends on an informed populace, and it seems to me that the main Republican supporters (regardless of the means of support they employed) focused most of their energy on making a majority of angry white males believe lies and propaganda. Deluded or pragmatic, these industrious wannabe-oligarchs have one thing in common: they have an inordinate amount of fear. They fear change. They fear the people they try to manipulate into voting against their interests. If these people became more informed, if their base of angry, white males learned how to question the Fox News narrative, to think critically, there would be no future for the Tea Party wing of Republicanism.

And oh boy! is their fear ever justified! Rational thinking is gaining ground in the USA like never before. But there will always be authoritarian thinkers, people who would rather adhere to traditional “family values” than make their own choices (while demanding that all others should rightly do the same). This is the true problem, and people like Trump, Palin and Limbaugh will hold sway with a certain percentage of the American public (20-30%, depending on the study) until the cycle of authoritarian belief can be broken. As rationality spreads like cleansing fire in a deadwood-choked temperate pinewood, as secular values are affirmed by more and more people (look at all of the ballot initiatives this year and how they were decided…the United States looks more secular today than I ever dreamed possible in the Bush II years), the insanity of the authoritarians becomes even more extreme. These people are still numerous enough, and powerful enough, to find it easy to spread their message to the unquestioning masses without any major media company calling them on their bullshit. But their volume grows as their desperation increases, while fewer and fewer people are susceptible to their way of thinking. America is changing – it’s leaving them behind.

Here in Canada, we have authoritarians too but they are generally pretty silent in all places except Alberta. Some of the propositions they accept on authority get mainstream dissemination, but lack of mainstream acceptance means that these beliefs are openly mocked and those who believe them are often way too embarrassed to admit to such insanity in public (except in Alberta, as noted above). I see this as the next step in the evolution of American society. If social conservatives and religious fundamentalists (the two main, overlapping authoritarian demographics) are too afraid of being ridiculed to publicly support anti-gay legislation, local schools with policies that contravene the 1st Amendment, creationism, anti-womens’ rights campaigns, etc., the power that these people wield is greatly diminished. There may be states in which this transformation is already showing, but people like Trump, Limbaugh, Beck, Bachmann, Palin, Ron Paul, and a huge number of wealthy television evangelicals have managed to keep the ball rolling for authoritarians. The war is not won, but the writing is certainly on the wall.

So no, I don’t pity them – I revile them. But for these people, America could be in a very different place today. Their hope lies in a system that perpetuates a cycle of obedience to authority figures and adherence to “received wisdom” that cannot be questioned by any God-fearing American. There is, however, plenty of evidence that a decent public education system coupled with all of the benefits of a cradle-to-grave welfare state results in a less dogmatic, happier, more equitable society (and it seems that, Tea Party notwithstanding, America is moving in this direction). But education remains the key: teaching the children of today’s authoritarians how to evaluate ideas on their merit, rather than on their source will certainly not eradicate dogmatic adherence to authoritarian values and beliefs, but at some point the cycle will be broken in enough of the population that such values and beliefs will become publicly mock-able. At some point, no amount of volume will serve to further the goals of the wannabe-oligarchs, and they will have to retreat into their holes, sniping at passers-by while trying to ignore the laughter of a nation deluded-no-more. Such a time is long past-due.